Perspectives on the Non-Human in Literature and Culture
About the Book Series
In recent years, many disciplines within the humanities have become increasingly concerned with non-human actors and entities. The environment, animals, machines, objects, weather, and other non-human beings and things have taken center stage to challenge assumptions about what we have traditionally called "the human." Informed by theoretical approaches like posthumanism, the new materialisms, (including Actor Network Theory, Object-Oriented Ontology, and similar approaches) ecocriticism, and critical animal studies, such scholarship has until now had no separate and identifiable collective home at an academic press. This series will provide that home, publishing work that shares a concern with the non-human in literary and cultural studies. The series invites single-authored books and essay collections that focus primarily on literary texts, but from an interdisciplinary, theoretically-informed perspective; it will include work that crosses geographical and period boundaries. Titles are characterized by dynamic interventions into established subjects and innovative studies on emerging topics.
Birds and Other Creatures in Renaissance Literature: Shakespeare, Descartes, and Animal Studies
1st Edition
By Rebecca Ann Bach
September 30, 2020
This book explores how humans in the Renaissance lived with, attended to, and considered the minds, feelings, and sociality of other creatures. It examines how Renaissance literature and natural history display an unequal creaturely world: all creatures were categorized hierarchically. However, ...
Meteorology and Physiology in Early Modern Culture: Earthquakes, Human Identity, and Textual Representation
1st Edition
By Rebecca Totaro
September 30, 2020
Meteorology and Physiology in Early Modern Culture: Earthquakes, Human Identity, and Textual Representation provides the first sustained examination of the foundational set of early modern beliefs linking meteorology and physiology. This was a relationship so intimate and, to us, poetic that we ...
Novel Creatures: Animal Life and the New Millennium
1st Edition
By Hilary Thompson
September 30, 2020
Novel Creatures takes a close look at the expanding interest in animals in modern times and argues that the novels of this period reveal a dramatic shift in conceptions of "creatureliness." Scholars have turned to the term "creaturely" recently to describe shared aspects of human and animal ...
Plants in Contemporary Poetry: Ecocriticism and the Botanical Imagination
1st Edition
By John Ryan
September 30, 2020
Positioned within current ecocritical scholarship, this volume is the first book-length study of the representations of plants in contemporary American, English, and Australian poetry. Through readings of botanically-minded writers including Les Murray, Louise Glück, and Alice Oswald, it addresses ...
Stages of Transmutation: Science Fiction, Biology, and Environmental Posthumanism
1st Edition
By Tom Idema
September 30, 2020
Stages of Transmutation: Science Fiction, Biology, and Environmental Posthumanism develops the theoretical perspective of environmental posthumanism through analyses of acclaimed science fiction novels by Greg Bear, Octavia Butler, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Jeff VanderMeer, in which the human ...
The Poetics of Angling in Early Modern England
1st Edition
By Myra E. Wright
September 30, 2020
Myra E. Wright takes ecocritical studies on an interdisciplinary turn toward the water with her new research monograph, The Poetics of Angling in Early Modern England. Identifying the lively presence of both literal and metaphorical images of sportfishing in all kinds of early modern writing, this ...
Victorians and Their Animals: Beast on a Leash
1st Edition
Edited
By Brenda Ayres
September 30, 2020
Victorians and Their Animals: Beast on a Leash investigates the notion that British Victorians did see themselves as a naturally dominant species over other humans and over animals. They were conscientiously, hegemonically determined to rule those beneath them and the animal within themselves, ...
Reading Literary Animals: Medieval to Modern
1st Edition
Edited
By Karen L. Edwards, Derek Ryan, Jane Spencer
September 11, 2019
Reading Literary Animals explores the status and representation of animals in literature from the Middle Ages to the present day. Essays by leading scholars in the field examine various figurative, agential, imaginative, ethical, and affective aspects of literary encounters with animality, showing ...
Race Matters, Animal Matters: Fugitive Humanism in African America, 1840-1930
1st Edition
By Lindgren Johnson
July 29, 2019
Race Matters, Animal Matters challenges one of the grand narratives of African American studies: that African Americans rejected racist associations of blackness and animality through a disassociation from animality. Analyzing canonical texts written by Frederick Douglass, Charles Chesnutt, Ida B. ...